Responsibility
by micatalsey
Summary: C-3PO's dismembered parts show up in Vader's clutches. For a fleeting moment, he's reminded of his mother.


"Shall I instruct the technicians to search its memory?"

The question lingered silently in the air.

Holding the droid's head in his palm was like feeling his heels sink into Tatooine sand. The sand always annoyed him; it wound up on every itching inch of his skin by the end of every day, and when he washed it off, there was always a planet full ready to take its place. There was nowhere to hide from the coarse stuff on Tatooine, regardless of where he went- even when he sneaked into the local cantina, where he would get muja juice from Taleen, the slave-girl that worked there, his arms would scrape against an invisible, gritty layer of leftover sand on the tops of the tables. There was no escaping it. When he finally left Tatooine, he thought he would never miss the feeling of sand between his fingers.

But then, he never thought he'd miss the feeling of having feet, either.

"Or.. would you rather have the ugnaughts smelt the thing?"

In some desolate place in his heart, tucked away and hidden in the shadows of his former life, his mother began lecturing him about his commitment to a shell of a protocol droid on their table. "Just remember, the droid is your responsibility. And unless you're prepared to care for something.. you don't deserve to have it." She curled her delicate but calloused fingers under his chin and brought his eyes up as she gave him a stern look. "I better not find him left outside overnight." With that, she chuckled softly and wrinkled up his hair. "Okay, mom," he said with a big grin, excited to get his hands on the droid. Working on scraps of metal here and there for Watto had only whet his appetite for engineering, and made it worse when he had to give his hard work over to the ugly alien to be sold to a moisture farmer who didn't know his socket wrench from a walking cane. Then his mother had come home with the beginning shell of a droid and given it to him to tinker with. It was his first real piece of work, and one that he could keep. Most nine year old kids got baby massiffs that followed them around the dingy little Tatooine town, but Anakin and his mother were slaves, and Shmi probably risked her life to smuggle this much metal and machinery into their home. And it was perfect. It was everything Anakin wanted, and Shmi knew it. His self-sacrificing mother, and his precious memory of her, what little time he had with her, resurfaced in his mind like an old heartache.

"Sir?"

Vader returned to the present. It took him a few moments to notice the commander standing patiently, albeit curiously, behind him, trying to get his attention. The commander and the stormtroopers were still in the room, witness to a very personal moment. They had been within the same four walls as he when his mind drifted back to then, and for a moment when he felt miserably homesick. Vader's jaw clenched under his helmet. They didn't deserve to witness that very raw, unprotected side of him, even if they couldn't see it behind his body of armor.

"Get out," he growled, turning to gesture a hand at them. He had only pointed to the door, but the three men flinched, as if expecting their toes to rise up off the ground in a fatal grip. Their hesitance only made him angrier. "Do I have to drill past your thick skull for you to obey, commander?" Failing to contain their panic, his underlings turned tail and scurried from the room.

He watched them go and struggled to restrain from killing them as they ran. He would have to find a fifth new commander this month if he killed that one, and the search process was tiresome. That fact alone kept the cowardly fool breathing. The thought of watching C-3PO melt away throttled him to his core. It would be like watching the memory of his mother being smelted, too.

He turned back to the droid and flexed his mechanical fingers against its cheek, realizing that he was made of as much metal as the droid. He pulled his cloak around and started polishing its forehead- and for a moment, he was the little boy on Tatooine: small, helpless, vulnerable, unable to stop bad things from happening to his mother. His head hung with that fact, because he was nothing but a slave, powerless in the great, big, dangerous galaxy.

Until, that is, his mother's fingers tucked under his chin and lifted his gaze.


End file.
